She shifted away from him and hopped off the desk, gathering her underwear and slacks with as much dignity as she could muster.
“I’m going to pop into the bathroom. Be right back,” she said, walking away before he had a chance to respond.
She closed the door to her private washroom and locked it before putting down the toilet seat and sitting down. A million different emotions roiled through her. Of course, pleasure still saturated every nerve of her body, but she had to keep blinking to stop the tears that burned her eyes from falling.
She wanted tonight to be real. Not just the sex but the dinner and the quiet conversation. She wanted it badly with every part of her being and it worried her that she might just be making it into something it wasn’t.
What if she walked back out there and he was casual and blasé about what had just happened? How was she going to play it? She wasn’t cool or sophisticated when it came to him. Any other man… Well, hell, any other man wouldn’t have made her feel what Dec did. It was just him, and she was slowly coming to realize that she wanted more from him than she’d believed she could get.
He was trying.
But she needed more than trying if she felt this strongly. She needed him to be someone that she wasn’t sure he could be. And she had the sinking feeling that she was setting herself up for heartache.
There was a knock on the door.
“You okay?”
“Yes, sorry. Just a few more minutes.”
“I’ve got to go wash up. And then I’m going to go and get DJ from the nursery. That will give you some time to yourself.”
“Okay.”
She needed both the time and the continued privacy. She stood up, realizing she couldn’t hide in here forever. She washed up, got dressed again. Her hair had slipped from her ponytail and she took it down and then slowly put it back up as she stared at herself in the mirror.
In movies and on TV people always seemed to convey conviction and determination with a look, but she couldn’t. The more she tried, the more fearful she was that tonight had been a mistake.
It was too soon for things to be sexual between them. He was still adjusting to having a son and she was still adjusting to him being back in her life.
She opened the door and found the room empty. She cleaned up the dishes from their dinner and noted that Dec had left the baby carrier behind. She put it back up on the table and got all of her stuff together so she was ready to go home when they returned.
Her cell phone rang and she glanced at the caller ID to see that it was Emma. “Hey, Em.”
“Hello, am I interrupting anything important?”
“No. I just finished a late dinner and am getting ready to head home. What’s up?”
“I was thinking more about the idea you emailed me this afternoon, the one about getting a second game out in this quarter so that we can increase profit to meet the financial targets that Allan set.”
“I’ve been thinking about it, too,” she said. It had been playing second fiddle to Dec all afternoon and evening. And Emma’s call was just what she needed to get her mind back where it needed to be.
“Well, how do you feel about contacting Fiona? You know she was on that matchmaking show last year with Alex Cannon. You are still friends with her, right?”
Hardly, Cari thought. She’d met Fiona McCaw-Cannon at a UN summer camp when they were sixteen and for three years they had been pen pals. Not exactly the kind of relationship that warranted a call to ask her new husband to come bail them out with an award-winning game design. “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not counting on that. I was thinking that we have our IOS team take our existing first-person-shooter game and turn it into a Christmas game for the iPad and Android tablets.”
“How will that work?” Emma asked.
“I thought we could change the target into a house or a tree and then have the game player decorate with a holiday gun? It’s just a first thought, but it would be a holiday game, and that is a lucrative market.”
“Yes, I like it. I’m going to send a meeting request to you and our project board. This sounds like the beginnings of just what we need. Use our existing assets.”
“It will save the bottom line, and I have to run it past finance, but I bet we wouldn’t need to sell too many to make a profit.”
“Good thinking. I can’t wait to discuss this tomorrow. Thanks, Cari.”
She said goodbye to her sister and leaned back in her office chair, wishing that she could solve the problem between her and Dec as easily. But games were much easier for her than real life because they were just that—games.
* * *
Tonight everything was going his way, Dec thought as he entered the nursery and retrieved his son from Rita, the day-care nurse who was on duty tonight. He carried the boy back toward Cari’s office. DJ was chortling happily, making that “dada” noise again and Dec felt like he was king of his world. There hadn’t been a lot of times when he’d been filled with… He didn’t really know what this was. He wasn’t a miserable son of a bitch generally, but he also wasn’t happy. But tonight he felt the first seeds of what he might be.